How to improve the work of your remote technical support team?

More and more companies are choosing to have a remote technical support team. In fact, Home Office jobs have multiple benefits for organizations.

However, poor telework management can cause problems that directly affect the user’s experience, such as inadequate Time Management and customer service that does not adhere to the company’s philosophy.

The result? Dissatisfied users who will sooner or later decide to change their service provider. Statistically, only 1 out of 26 users express their dissatisfaction with customer services, while the rest of them decide to unsubscribe without giving further details.

Precisely now, when remote assistance is a recurrent dynamic in technology companies, it is necessary to attack the weaknesses in work teams to eliminate any obstacle that may interfere with customer loyalty and CLTV.

Before executing an action plan to improve technical support, you must identify the most common errors.

Main errors in remote technical support teams

Teamwork and interdepartmental collaboration are one of the biggest obstacles to satisfactory remote technical support. Here we break them down:

Procrastination

Not everyone can work from home with complete discipline. There are countless distractions that can hinder workflow and timely customer service.

When this problem goes unnoticed, requests tend to accumulate and technical problems can become increasingly unbearable for users.

Likewise, procrastination is related to a deficient prioritization of tasks and null control over the workforce of the remote team. The lack of centralized processes is one of the main causes of this problem.

Lack of collaboration

Historically, teamwork has been the cornerstone of productivity. Therefore, when there is no collaborative culture in remote teams, customer waiting times multiply, as well as system errors tend to be recurrent and employees encounter more pitfalls on the way to problem-solving.

Cross-departmental collaboration promotes the structuring of action plans that reduce downtime and prevent the emergence of vulnerabilities. In the long run, these actions optimize the usability of the interfaces and improve the reputation of the company.

Working without context

In addition to the lack of collaboration, decontextualized work is also added. The silos between tools avert the remote team from having an overview of the health of the client’s assets. Working with unconnected data only generates an accumulation of Dark Data and avoids detection of the core problem at the right time.

Excess of tasks

One of the biggest threats of telework is overwork and stress. That is to say, to have a reduced team of technicians assigned to carry out a great number of microtasks.

Over time, these activities become boring, repetitive, and strenuous. This situation reduces the team’s ability to resolve conflicts and keeps employees away from the most critical projects.

To solve this problem, some companies implement task automation and self-service tools. In this way, the user can solve simple problems without having to wait for the support service. On the other hand, the company saves time with the execution of automatic tickets.

Here are 5 tips to improve the performance of your remote technical support.

How to improve the quality of your remote technical support?

# 1 Structuring service levels

It is important to have an updated Service Quality Plan (SQP). Companies are constantly evolving, just like their customers. For this reason, it is important to review every 6 months the following points of your organization’s SQP: objectives of support services, estimation of resources or IT assets, Key Performance Indicators; as well as the protocols for monitoring outsourcing services.

We also recommend that you define the range of action of each technician to avoid work overload and to reduce the bugs generated by lack of maintenance. Without micromanaging your team, you must assign a diverse type of support to the different layers of the systems. In this way, try to focus on hardware, programming, data center administration, user administration, web administration, solution development, and infrastructure.

# 2 Training is vital

Offer free training to support technicians. Instruct them in different areas such as customer service, effective communication, and management, as well as keep them updated on IT, tool management, programming languages, cybersecurity, and another protocol. In this way, you can have employees ready to tackle problems with a holistic approach and a solid organizational sense.

# 3 Having a Knowledge Base

Facilitate user experience with self-service and FAQ pages or customer training. With a basic terminology library, accessible manuals and simple hacks, the user avoid unnecessary waiting time and your team reduces the number of tickets to be resolved.

# 4 Personalized and multichannel service

According to reports, most clients are willing to pay 12% more in exchange for better quality customer service. Therefore, focusing on solving customer problems is the best investment you can make to increase profitability in the company. However, building user loyalty is cheaper than acquiring new customers.

In this sense, it will always be a good idea to activate a multichannel attention strategy with immediacy characteristics. In other words, you can use the company’s social networks to answer specific questions about the product or service. Likewise, it is advisable to implement live chats and video calls to deal with the most serious problems or disgruntled customers with a recurring incidence.

# 5 Using an integrative software

Rely on tools that allow you to centralize support activities and visualize in real time the behaviors of the systems. It is also essential to have the capacity to automate tasks, attend tickets with cross-departmental efforts and generate intuitive internal communication channels.